Simple Ideas, Robust Evidence, Part 9: My Life in the Industrialized World

The controversies over pollution issues and what I learned

My post yesterday on Global Warming spurred me to think about the history of my thinking on this issue. I also thought of my environmental awareness and how it began, and it led to this post.

My father said that when I was one year old, my parents could stick me in a sandbox in our Seattle neighborhood and I could just sit and look at my world for hours (while eating sand). When I was four, I asked my mother how it went from day to night, and she said that one minute it was light and the next minute it was dark. I performed my first experiment, watching the sky from our living room window as the day ended, waiting for that moment that never came.

On the report card in my earliest years of school, the teacher remarked on my fascination with nature. In our year in Houston, when my father worked for NASA, I attended a Saturday-morning science class at a museum with my brother. I collected fossils and brought them to my teacher to identify, and I had a favorite fossil rock (which had what appeared to be fossilized skin) that I brought back to California, which eventually disappeared from our backyard, to my lasting disappointment.

My father was raised on a farm, and he turned our huge backyards into little farms. Over the years, we had dogs, cats, guinea pigs, mice, rats, rabbits, chickens, fish, turtles, and my father even had a pet squirrel and a hawk. We even took care of a baby raccoon for a while, opossums would eat from our dog’s dish at night, and I am probably forgetting a few other species. My father’s initial bid to leave his career in the military was to build a worm farm in our back yard, which I helped build.

I witnessed the Santa Barbara oil spill, which may have been the beginning of my environmental awareness. Growing up in the sunny beach town of Ventura, California, definitely had its benefits. Downtown Los Angeles was an hour’s drive away, and when I was about 14, we drove to LA’s Natural History Museum. The highway to LA went over a pass to travel through the San Fernando Valley. As soon as we crested the pass, I got a headache, and it lasted the entire day, until we came back over that pass on the way home. It was from LA’s prodigious air pollution. It was hellish. Ventura never got LA’s air pollution unless the Santa Ana winds blew, and I would get a sinus infection whenever they did.

When I began to understand my mentor’s engine about a year later, one of its benefits would be the end of LA’s air pollution, which almost all came from internal-combustion engines, which helped motivate me. For the rest of my years growing up, I only went to LA for Dodgers games and Disneyland. I went to the university in idyllic San Luis Obispo, planned to move to Seattle after graduation, but picked the worst recession in 40 years to graduate, ended up in LA a year later, rooming with my first college roomie, who planned to move to San Francisco after graduation. Our other accountant roomie was raised in Claremont and grew up skiing on Mount Baldy. The prevailing winds off the ocean blew LA’s air pollution inland, and places such as Claremont bore the brunt of it. Although it was at the base of Mount Baldy, that mountain was visible only a few days a year because of the air pollution. My roomie took me golfing one day around Claremont, and at the end, it hurt to breathe, which was from the ozone. I had several such episodes in my youth, which was a price of exercising in polluted air.

I could tell many air-pollution stories of my days in LA, when people shrieked in horror and had other reactions. One afternoon, while driving back to my home in LA from Ventura from a visit to my parents, it was one of those clear days when I could see downtown LA with the mountain backdrop as I drove through the San Fernando Valley, right after it had rained. That view could only be seen a few days a year. The next morning, I had to drive on the same highway to work, and the smog blanket had completely recovered, so that visibility was a mile or so. It took one rush hour.

When I worked in Skid Row LA for several months in 1983, during peak smog season I would be outside for only five minutes when I would have sneezing attacks, and on the Kleenex after I sneezed were black particles. Walking past a dead body on the way to lunch epitomized those days. It was so nightmarish that we did not even talk about the dead body that we walked past. We walked another fifty yards to a restaurant where we had lunch, and when we were finished, the body had been removed. It was just another day in Skid Row, and if there was a saving grace to those days for me, it helped inspire my free-energy efforts. I wanted to end the world that I saw. It was like hell on Earth.

Only a couple of years later, my desperate prayer led me to Dennis Lee and my wild ride began. After Mr. Professor and I busted Dennis out of jail, in one of Dennis’s books, he wrote that my first love was the environment. I still don’t quite know how he realized that. I did not think that I advertised it, but I began developing my vision of the Fifth Epoch when I became Dennis’s partner, and it must have showed. But that vision was arguably equally about improving the human condition as it was healing the human damage to Earth.

I certainly did not think in Peak Oil terms in those days, and Global Warming was not a prominent issue then. But acid rain was. It was only when I began my days of study that I became very aware of the Global Warming issue, and it was largely because of the efforts of Fred Singer and friends, who led the effort on behalf of the oil companies to muddy the issue, to create the appearance of doubt where there was not any. One of Media Lens’s founders, David Edwards, was calling it out a decade before articles such as this one, which I read in Z Magazine and elsewhere. Fred Singer was one of his focuses. Fred was one of a handful of scientists, who all got money from oil companies, who attacked the idea of Global Warming in the early 1990s. It was all of the climate scientists on Earth versus a few oil-company shills, and the press acted as if there was a genuine controversy over Global Warming. The “controversy” that the media presented was fraudulent. It was no different from who funded studies on the relationship of sugar, obesity, and diabetes: the Big-Food-funded studies could never find a connection, while nearly all other studies did.

In early 1997, I read an article on Julian Simon in Wired magazine. Simon was an economist who was full of “good news” about humanity and the state of the environment. I have written that my first essays on my site as it stands today are my Columbus and fluoride essays, which is true, but they are not the first essays that I worked on. I spent several months in 1997 and early 1998 working on an essay about Julian Simon. A hard drive failure (partly my fault) and the failure of my tape backup to restore my data (typical in those days, before disk storage was available to home-computer users), caused me to lose about 80 pages of work.

I eventually salvaged some of my effort by writing my Julian Simon essay. It was based on my studies of his The State of Humanity and the work of its authors. It was the chamber-of-commerce version of the human journey. Every author that I looked into was a corporate cheerleader with tremendous conflicts of interest. Elizabeth Whelan wrote the chapter on chemical pollution, downplaying it while taking money from those very same polluters. She was the disciple of Frederick Stare, who became infamous for defending junk food in Congressional hearings before it was discovered that his Department of Nutrition at Harvard was generously funded by the same companies whose junk food he defended.

Whelan was cut from the same cloth, and she had the audacity to accuse activists who fought corporate practices of conflicts of interest in her books (such as Ralph Nader). The system devours its own. Simon died of a heart attack at age 65 while Whelan died at age 70 of an immune system out of control (sepsis). I’ll allow that Simon and Whelan may have actually believed what they wrote, as people can believe anything, especially when they are paid to believe it.

In Singer’s chapter in The State of Humanity, he questioned the ozone-hole issue and whether it was really caused by corporate chemicals. That handful of scientists that I earlier mentioned, who challenged Global Warming, included Patrick Michaels, who wrote a chapter that downplayed the Greenhouse effect. Simon’s entire book was like that, as corporate hired guns fired away. I had to study the nuclear-power and nuclear-waste issues at length before I spoke at those Department of Energy hearings in early 1997, and Simon’s book had a chapter on the hazards of nuclear power that was written by the biggest cheerleader of nuclear power that I ever saw, Bernard Cohen, who even offered to eat plutonium, to demonstrate how harmless it was. I could go on and on, but I think that I have made the picture clear.

That book was anything but impartial scientific findings, and it showed the depths of delusion that ideologues could sink to. How many of them really believed what they wrote? Sadly, probably most of them did, but Singer does not get my benefit of the doubt: he knew what he was doing.

As I have written, I explored many fringe topics in the 1990s, and most of them did not survive my scrutiny. I read a biography of Einstein in the 1980s, so I was always somewhat studying mainstream science. But I really did not think too much about the mechanics of Global Warming in those days.

When Brian O’Leary and I had our epic note-trading session in August, 2001, I asked about Fred Singer, and I didn’t know that Brian knew Fred when I asked. Brian’s work on Mars’s atmosphere and surface was why he was hired as an astronaut. Brian was an Earth climate scientist, too, and Singer mentored Brian early in his career.

When I mentioned Singer to Brian, he became the angriest that I ever saw him. Brian planned to confront Singer about his fraudulent work on atmospheric science and Global Warming. Brian felt a great sense of betrayal that a man who mentored him turned to the dark side like that. Brian eventually wrote about Singer.

It was only after I finished the 2002 version of my site and one of Bucky Fuller’s students called me a comprehensivist, and he had me read some of Fuller’s work to understand what “comprehensivist” meant, that I really resumed my science studies in earnest, after a 25-year break. Like I ask of the people I seek, it was mostly popularized science, the kind that Einstein loved reading as a child. People do not need to be professional scientists and read specialist literature to understand the gist of the issues.

In that phase of my studies, I came to the Global Warming issue rather tangentially. I began studying paleology, and it soon became clear that carbon dioxide was considered the primary driver of Earth’s climate change over the eons. The science was very robust. Using paleomagnetic evidence (magnetic minerals in lava that aligned with magnetic north before the lava cooled and hardened), dating with mass spectrometers and other techniques, scientists had been able to reconstruct Earth’s geological and climatic past to an amazing degree. Fossils indicated if those organisms lived in warm or cold climates (and their descendants generally live today), glaciers left grooves in the bedrock, and isotopic studies could determine past temperatures. Paleologists used many lines of evidence to reconstruct Earth’s past, and it was the very definition of robust science.

Astronomers have studied millions of stars, and the life cycle of stars such as our Sun has been long established. Our Sun still has billions of years left in its “main sequence,” and it has been slowly brightening. Other than that slow brightening, solar variation is not considered to have had a great effect on the variability of Earth’s climate. The biggest variable, by far, has been the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide content. It is related to the carbon cycle. At least until the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide has been introduced to the surface’s carbon cycle by volcanism and generally removed through weathering and deposition on the ocean floor (mainly through the sediments of dead life, but the Carboniferous burial of what became coal is an exception) and subduction as oceanic plates get buried beneath continental plates.

Scientists think that the eon of complex life began with at least ten times the atmospheric carbon-dioxide content that we have today. The swings have caused ice ages and hot periods, but also, probably since Earth formed, far more carbon has been buried in the crust and mantle than has been introduced by volcanism, which has also gradually waned over the eons, as the radioactivity in Earth’s interior declines and the tectonic plates move more slowly. Life on Earth is slowly being carbon-starved. One piece of evidence for that is that about 30 million years ago, some plants evolved a new form of photosynthesis that conserves carbon, and grasses are the most prominent practitioners of that new kind of photosynthesis.

I am only hitting the highlights, but the science behind those findings is prodigious and multidisciplinary, and the idea that increasing carbon dioxide by 50% in the past 150 years won’t warm Earth dramatically is a ludicrous idea to paleologists. A change that dramatic has not happened in the history of life on Earth. Soul-sold scientists such as Singer have zero credibility with paleologists. It was studying paleology that really drove home to me how fraudulent the work of people such as Singer is, and how people who doubt Global Warming are serving their ideological predispositions, not any sense of reality backed by any credible science.

I have also spent a great deal of time studying the work of Global Warming deniers, and it was just like studying the work of Holocaust deniers: they counted on the ignorance of their audience and their willingness to believe what they wanted to hear. The deniers often seized on the climate scientists, of their personality defects or political affiliations, both real and imagined, to make their cases. I found those denier arguments similar to Graham Hancock’s arguments and “evidence” that Antarctica was ice-free in historical times. There is not a scientist alive who believes that. But Global Warming denial serves the interest of the Hydrocarbon Lobby, so the media gave Singer and friends a respectable hearing. No powerful vested interests care if Antarctica was ice-free in historical times, so Graham remains on the lunatic fringe.

To be clear, climate has always changed. That is Earth’s nature, but carbon-dioxide levels have always been the primary driver of that change, especially in the eon of complex life, and anybody who challenges that has a huge body of interrelated scientific evidence to overcome. I have never seen anybody credibly try to. Those like Singer rely on the scientific illiteracy of their audience, to tell them what they want to hear (that our actions have no consequences), so that they can all go about their business as usual. It is one hell of a gamble to continue business as usual. This is really no different from all the denials and ridicule that I received when I mentioned that processed food harmed our health: nobody wanted to hear it, even when they knew that their diets were killing them. This is a human universal today, and brings up Brian’s question of whether humans are a sentient species.

Until the beginning of domestication, when humans began destroying the forests and soils (we have wiped out half of Earth’s plant biomass since then and nearly all wild mammals, and that was after wiping out the megafauna), Earth was in the midst of an ice age, and the ice sheets would probably be growing back by now if not for the increase in greenhouse gases from human activities, which has skyrocketed since humanity industrialized by burning fossil fuels. To believe that it won’t matter is whistling past the graveyard.

Human activity may have ended the ice age, which was likely going to last for many more millions of years. That is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is the rate of change. It is already overwhelming the ability of species to adapt. The biggest risk to humanity, other than that some parts of Earth may become uninhabitable in this century, will be epic crop failures, which will hit poor nations far harder than rich ones, and billions could starve to death. That is likely the biggest risk, and billions of environmental refugees could spark wars like have never been seen before, and if nuclear powers go to war, it could be Game Over for humanity. We are already having wars over the dwindling oil. These are very real risks, and almost nobody on Earth is doing anything about it.

There is one and only one solution that I know of: the arrival of free-energy technology for human use. Not only will it make every human on Earth richer than Bill Gates, just as the average American is richer than the world’s richest man of three centuries ago, we will also stop driving species to extinction and making Earth uninhabitable. The technology is older than I am, and almost nobody knows or cares. That is the surreal part, for me. Fuller called our choice the one between Utopia or oblivion, and I have called it the choice between the Fifth Epoch or the Sixth Mass Extinction that might take us with it.

But I am not done, and I have a plan that will work, if I can find the people for it. My Substack experiment is my latest attempt to find them, and I know who I am looking for.